Everyone’s an Influencer. Now What?

“You should be an influencer.”

You could really just be going about your day peacefully, sifting through an assortment of mismatched Tupperware (as adults do), and the next thing you know, a stranger on the internet says something that alters the course of your life. In my case, dear reader, it was the (rather preposterous) suggestion that I, your fairly average twenty-something with a less-than-healthy attachment towards purses (and, well, people), should become an influencer.

Preposterous, I say. But is it really?

After all, Megs has written at length about how influencers and YouTubers have overtaken doctors and teachers as the hot new careers du jour among third-graders. Research by influencer marketing and technology platform IZEA revealed that 54% of 18-to-60-year-olds were willing to quit their day jobs to become full-time social media influencers – 26% already considered themselves influencers simply because of how chronically online they are.

But it is really when your baby boomer dad starts inquiring about making money off of Facebook content creation that you know the generational divide is just a social construct. “What content are you even going to create?” I implore. “Oh, I don’t know, just our everyday lives?” he replies.

So, is that what our lives are now? Just content?

“Talk about something cool, like food or clothes or Joan Didion!”

There are few movies in Hollywood history as prescient as Ingrid Goes West (2017). In it, the titular Ingrid, wielding her iPhone, declares, “If you don’t have anyone to share anything with, then what’s the point of living?”

In other words, if it’s not content, is your life even worth living?

You see, influencing today has become a lucrative livelihood – if not the most lucrative. It was only a year after Ingrid’s westward spiral that Dior rereleased its Y2K icon, the Saddle Bag. And by released, I mean shoved it down our throats when influencers left, and right began posting in unison, flooding our feeds with the $4,000+ bag they didn’t even pay for in the first place.

“[Gifting] hasn’t necessarily increased our earnings too much compared to regular paid-for ads, but there is more engagement and more traffic coming to our website,” says Marquis Matson, the head of content marketing at womenswear label Sozy. The first step to sales, after all, is brand awareness.

What gifting has enabled, however, is a stream of content creators across the webosphere to happily trade away their lives in exchange for swag, likes, and exposure. And these days, it’s the micro-influencers that hold higher conversion rates and greater intrigue. You could be waxing lyrical about the worn corners of Jane Birkin’s Birkin, or making cinnamon rolls from scratch like Nara Smith, and still be entitled to a Marc Jacobs Tote bag. 

And the appeal? This could be you! This could be me!

So, Are You an Influencer? Am I?

Going back to the aforementioned stranger – a stranger who, by now, has become a close companion (because who wouldn’t want to keep people with such unfounded belief in our abilities within close quarters?) – it was the conviction in his voice that stirred something in me.

You see, wanting to be an influencer and wanting to be asked to be an influencer are each uniquely personal fallibilities. And almost everybody (probably) wants to be asked; it strokes that primitive instinct in us that craves external validation from people on the Internet.

It’s akin to you walking down the street, and somebody calls out: “Hey” – dollar signs in their eyes – “Hey! Have you ever considered becoming an influencer?” You, blushing and bashful, say, “Why, no, actually” – because you’re just too smart, or too busy, or too something. And of course, because that would be gauche. You always want to be invited, even if you don’t want to go.

Yet, as I reflect upon the rather strange year that 2025 has been – which seemed to flash by way too fast, but also, at times, not fast enough – I realize that I, too, have lately been making a concerted effort to, well, document.

I pose artfully in outfits I’ve carefully picked out, gracefully prop my PS1 against barstools under good lighting, tag the places I visit, screenshot the films I watch, show off the blurry remnants of a night out that looks wilder in pictures than in real life – and post it all on Instagram, meticulously paired with music tastefully reflective of my alternate tastes… all for the amusement of my 400-something followers on the platform.

Have I, too, then become the influencer I so dread and deride?

If Everyone’s the Influencer, Who’s the Consumer?

And it is thus, on a fine day last week, it felt good to just turn it all off. Disconnect, deactivate, disengage. All my posts? Archived. Highlights? Unhighlighted. Even the profile picture got the axe.

Overnight, I went from the person on the threshold of wanting to be online, wanting to be permanently reachable, wanting to have a curated digital existence, and really, wanting to influence… to someone with a blank profile, no different than those fraudulent fake accounts peddling cryptocurrencies.

Actually, no, scratch that. Even they have a greater online presence than I did now. And it was liberating. It was mysterious, even slightly seductive. I felt like Martin Margiela or Phoebe Philo, disinterested in artifice or external display. Not having to constantly perform and present felt invincible.

But it also felt confusing. 

Who was I without my weekly gym dumps or morning coffee runs? Who was I if I wasn’t taking gratuitously half-obscured pictures of myself artfully perching my new LV Montsouris on one shoulder, or having furious online discourse with strangers about Emily in Paris? Here was someone who took himself so seriously that he had no idea how to be unserious anymore.

Author James Craig wrote in Dazed last year about a strange phenomenon he witnessed at a Lana Del Rey concert: an attendee not filming the singer, but herself: “beaming into the camera, screaming with exaggerated joy and singing along to the lyrics, rarely even glancing up at the stage. Even on the rare occasions she wasn’t filming, she was watching her own videos back and smiling fondly (I realize that, having spent so much time watching this woman watching herself, the joke is really on me).”

And somehow, this encapsulates exactly how it feels to be online: everyone is both a content creator and a client. There’s this vaguely ambient sense that everyone everywhere is always working, checking off boxes: smile? Check. Loewe bag? Check. Skim latte? Check. Perhaps this culture of self-presentation and branding, at the end of the day, is all for our own validation. 

But that being said, don’t forget to put the Paris filter though!